Moroni 7

Now I’m writing some things Dad (Mormon) said about faith, hope, and love (a.k.a., charity) while he was teaching in our synagogue:

God lets me speak, so I allow myself.

The church held meetings often, to swap confessions, pray for each other, and remediate hurt feelings. You’re good people who love Jesus. I float on your condescension to me. I’m called to do this, you’re called to listen. When it’s all over we’ll rest from such tasks.

How do I know you’re “good”? I watch how calmly you work together. God said to watch what people do and decide what they are. A bad person can’t do good things. Okay, that’s simplistic. Let me put it this way: you have to intend to do good, however it might come out sometimes. And even if the act outwardly passes the audition of people’s eyes, what’s your real agenda?

If you do good with a grudge, God sweeps it out the back door or throws it in the dumpster. God doesn’t take praise through clenched teeth. He doesn’t hear prayers said through pursed lips.

You’ve dug wells. Some of them taste of sulfur. You’ll never quench thirst from those no matter how long you drink. If your soul is flooded with the sulfur of hell, you pour out bitterness, no matter how hard you pump.

So while there are subtleties of behavior shot through our every moment, you have to check the taste of the well.

We’ve talked about the devil for centuries now. That’s what reveals—or conceals—true “goodness.” Everything good comes from God, everything bad from the devil. I know, we can ask “but who made the devil?” Let’s not go there today. I’m moving in a different direction. Non-philosophical.

If you feel drawn to good things, that’s God putting his pies out on the windowsill. He’s almost baiting you to come to him. Enticement works both ways. If you are being persuaded to savor things that stink and that instinct tells you will sicken you at the taste, that’s master ad-campaign czar Satan at the controls. (Take liquor: why would anyone drink it, except to lose control?)

Anything that leads you to behave well comes from God. Anything that pushes you back or down is from the devil. Got it? It feels plain to old guys like me. I know some of this is generational, but give me credit for having hit every rock in the road you’ll ever hit, and with harder wheels at that. To me it’s as plain as day—and I don’t mean the kind of day where it never gets light. That only happened once.

You don’t have to go to school for this. You only need to be breathing, have blood pumping through your veins. Because Jesus put something in the stew that makes a human being, a reactive agent that foams up when evil gets poured in, even by the dropper full. You can feel it foaming in you, every one of you.

When God gets poured in, your soul stays clear as water. If you can see right through it, the water is clean. They say cleanliness is next to godliness. I say transparency is godliness.

Satan holds the copyright to anything that argues for hurting people. His demons are the printers and distributors. If they hand you a copy, throw it in the dumpster where God threw your hidden agendas.

I’m giving you light here. Or rather, pointing out the light that’s born into you. The kind Jesus gave you for a birthday present. If you judge proportionately, fairly, keenly, no one can indict you. Your perception reflects back at you. Your gauge is what people (including the person named God) will hold to your conduct.

So don’t hide in the corner of your life. Walk into the light, inspect, reach for good things. The more you grab up and don’t fret over it, or worse, castigate it, the wider your heavenly birth certificate unfolds.

So how do you grab it all up?

God knew everything before you knew anything. The world went on long before you had any consciousness of it or in it.

Nothing started with you. Climb off your high horse of implicit omniscience. Trust angels and holy men who lived and died before your birth. Especially trust them about Jesus, who dispenses all goodness, from the olives in every non-allegorical orchard to the poetry in every book describing them.

Angels, whether heaven-born or earth-born, have taught goodness always. And goodness is the essence of what we call faith, that confidence to act on your good intentions.

After Jesus came to earth, not just in people’s dreams but materially, people had an edge. They could claim the new promise that whatever good thing one asked God for in Jesus’ name, confident in its reception and its worth, God would give it.

It’s a bit tautological, I know: if the thing doesn’t come, does that just mean it wasn’t really good? Lots of speculations are possible. But if you take my concept to heart, you’ll find something deeply genuine in it.

You might think I’m talking about miracles. And you’d be right. Do you really think “miracles” are contingent on the era in which one lives? What kind of world would that be?

Just because Jesus fulfilled the law, finished his work on earth, renegotiated God’s relationship to his children, etc., does that mean wonder and mystery and sudden serendipities are now subject to rules and hyperlogical logistics? If anything it would be the other way around: less of those things in old times and more of them now.

As for angels, just try and live your whole life without believing in at least one of them. And if one, who’s to say not more?

(Profound believers even see them sometimes. And you’ll never talk them out of that witness.)

Angels are like miracles, but with actual mission statements and checklists and résumés. Nothing serendipitous about them. They speak to men’s spirits, telling them to veer upward. They campaign invisibly for cultural shifts that pave the road for new directions. They are notably fond of the Anointed One, Jesus. When you hear his name or that title, the thrill you sometimes feel is probably an angel tugging at your clothes or nudging you in the ribs.

God’s trying, believe me, by hook or by crook, to corral people into his doctrine and covenants, sensing that the attendant spirit will beautifully flavor their future.

Two Jesus quotes come to mind: “Believe in me and you can do anything, as long as I approve the blueprints.” And, “Repent, people, come to me, get baptized, and believe in me, not necessarily in that order.”

I’m not sure how those fit in, but I felt impressed to quote them to you. Maybe it’s to put your minds in the right sphere to accept that miracles are far from obsolete.

Do you think they are? Do you think angels have withered away from the phenomenal world? Do you think God hoards his spirit and won’t share a piece of it?

Obviously not. The world would be a stinking landfill if these things had vanished. But you have to shovel deep into your willpower to accept them before they can happen.

If you want your sense of self to endure past your demise and you want happiness to be part of that sense of self, Jesus says you have to believe in his name, which means embrace all that his name conjures to you and the community of faithful people—including miracles and angels and the whole realm of supernatural phenomena. Because if those things don’t exist, this is all a temple of cards.

I think you’re with me on this. I sense you’ve subdued the arrogance of human nature enough to represent him.

You have faith. And you can’t have faith, it seems to me, if you don’t have some kind of hope to propel it—hope being expectation and faith being action based on expectation.

Now what, in my opinion, should you be expecting? That through the Anointed One’s Great Reconciliation, including his trampling of death, you will be, through your faith, charged with godhood, the bliss of deity to nourish your new life outside of time.

You can’t have faith and hope, by the way, unless you’re self-effacing, you’ve retracted the claws of self-promotion. If you haven’t, you have counterfeit faith and hope. It has no real purchase with God. But if you have done what I’ve urged, you still need a certain kind of unearthly love to validate your doings.

This love grinds under the weight of itself, but remains kind. It desires nothing beyond need and refuses to puff up its chest. It always asks how to spread personal benefits to the widest receivers. You can’t goad it into red-faced hostility. It constrains its thoughts into narrow but unfathomably deep channels. It doesn’t get a kick out of any kind of sinning, just in being truthful. It doesn’t succumb to pressure. It doesn’t pre-judge new assertions, it doesn’t thrash around in the garbage pails of emotion, and it puts up with more than it could have promised.

If you don’t have some version of this love, you’ve lost all claim to “goodness.” That trait becomes a hollow, Platonic shell. (I’ll explain that reference some other time.) The love of which I speak is indestructible. So climb into it like armor. Other substances fade. This, never.

You worry about God’s judgment. If you have this love of which I speak as your master—it enslaves you, if you will—you will slide through any judgment, nerves intact, spirit unscorched.

Given that, pray for this love harder than for anything else in your life. Because it’s a gift. It has to be poured into your being. Jesus does that in some form or another with anyone who’s open to it, modifying their lives into a state of divine heirship. If you have that, you can kick fear out of your lives. And when Jesus comes back to earth, you won’t find his appearance or powers strange. Because he’s been silently indoctrinating you with them for years. Indeed you may have seen some of that divine appearance in your own mirror. Amen.